Support Breakfast Podcast | Episode 40 – Tag, you’re it!

This week, Kiwi Sarah and Lisa are talking about tagging. No, not graffiti – we’re getting into the subject of ticket labelling and classification. How can we extract useful info from our conversations with customers and apply it to improving our product and our support?

But first, breakfast…

Kiwi Sarah didn’t have breakfast. Instead she had breakfast for brunch/lunch/dinner (?) – a big and delicious-sounding vegan fry up.

Lisa had eggs with breakfast potatoes (for regular listeners, these are the same as the harissa potatoes she had before but with Italian seasoning (basil, oregano, rosemary & thyme) instead. She is out of hot sauce, which was a breakfast tragedy.

Customer Stories

We talk about the embarrassment of misspelling your own name and also about offering phone support – it’s never as bad as we expect when we’re building up to it.

Mailbag

This week we received an email from Gwera, who is interviewing for a dream job but doesn’t really want to relocate:

How does one approach expressing this sentiment to the interviewer? How do I navigate a situation where I can live in Toronto with occasional travel to London for work?

While neither of us have done exactly this, we do have some suggestions for questions you can ask or things to look in to in order to navigate a role working remotely (and in a different time zone) to the office.

We also received an email this week from Max at JitBit, who is interested in potentially sponsoring the podcast. This isn’t something we’ve had a chance to discuss as an entire group but when we do, we’ll get back to you, Max.

And now on to this week’s topic

If you want to skip straight to the discussion, it starts FILL IN HERE into the episode.

Sarah and Lisa talk through these questions:

A few key takeaways:

You might need to iterate on the way support communicates with your developers as the company and team changes.

Communication may not happen organically so try to create opportunities to keep support in the loop, whether that’s a specific meeting or inviting support to the developer standups.

Cross-team projects are a great way to build relationships.

You might need to chase developers up to communicate with you in a way that you understand and can explain clearly to customers.

Work to build empathy for your team and their technical limitations, as well as empathy for customers.

Not everyone communicates in the same way – if possible try to create something like a user guides, here are the questions that Chelsea and I used for ours.

Homework

If it’s before 7pm on Thursday, September 28th, you may still be able to get a ticket for the event that Lisa is running as part of her new project, London Support Lab:

Chelsea also has homework: take a few minutes this week to improve one relationship or communication process.

That’s it for this time – if you have a topic you’d like to hear us get into or want to help out in some way, email us hello@supportbreakfast.com.

Great show!
I would like to comment that in tagging what i have done is used fields on transitions that are mandatory to be filled. Example: when escalating a ticket to the dev team you must indicate which of the predefined modules is affected in our platform.
This is a safe, semi-automated way to involve the team in creating the metrics that are important to the product.